Surely, this tell-all would rock the best-seller lists: Studio Head, the confessions of Jon Peters, the unschooled half-Cherokee hairdresser who went from styling (and wooing) Barbra Streisand to running Columbia Pictures while racking up two decades of box-office hits, kick-ass brawls, and leading-lady conquests before his luck went south. Sex? Plenty. Violence? Yup. Scandal? Absolutely. As Peters’s erstwhile co-writer, the author recounts, there is endless dirt to be dished—both by and about the controversial producer—even if it never ends up between hard covers.

‘Ijust ruined your life,” one of Hollywood’s more sadistic producers exulted into his iPhone. “I gave your number to Jon Peters. He wants you to write his book.” Thus began, in February 2009, my star-studdedly surreal odyssey into entertainment’s heart of darkness—the quasi-literary subgenre known as the celebrity memoir, or tell-all. My first reaction to the producer’s call was to beg off. The last thing the recession-hobbled book trade wanted was someone whom heat-seeking editors might dismiss as another showbiz has-been.

Cruelty, thy name is Hollywood. The descent from mogul to footnote doesn’t take long. Peters’s last producer credit was in 2006, for Superman Returns. Despite its worldwide gross of nearly $400 million, somehow that film—which cost $200 million—was considered a disappointment, just like his penultimate effort, Ali, back in 2001, ancient history in Hollywood time. More recently, Peters had been in the tabloids, not for romancing stars and supermodels but for civil suits involving sexual harassment, both straight and gay.

Jon Peters was supposedly the luckiest man in the history of film: an unschooled Native American hairdresser who had taken Barbra Streisand’s tresses to the bank and parlayed them into a producing partnership on the Warner lot with Peter Guber. (The rumors had it that Peters was the inspiration for the Warren Beatty hairdresser in Shampoo and the Richard Gere stud in American Gigolo.) Their string of hits in the 80s—Flashdance, The Color Purple, Rain Man, and Batman—made them ideal candidates to take over Columbia Pictures after it was acquired by Sony in one of the decade’s more memorable deals. Along the way, Peters had romanced celluloid goddesses such as Kim Basinger, Sharon Stone, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Hollywood may be a town of lucky people, but Jon Peters’s good fortune was too outrageous, especially for those turned off by his violent temper and famous arrogance. Everyone seemed to hate Jon Peters. They all wanted him gone, and gone he seemed to be—two decades from his glory shot, down and out in Beverly Hills.

But the hatred was fascinating to me. A title flashed through my mind: Studio Head. It was a triple entendre, but maybe he was, too. The idea of a Cherokee Sammy Glick was too intriguing to pass up. Maybe there was a book here. I took Peters’s call when soon it came.

The legendary Lothario I met for lunch at the Polo Lounge looked far less like Richard Gere than a boy in the hood. The then 63-year-old Jon Peters wore a black wool gangsta stocking cap pulled down to his shaded eyes and a baggy black tracksuit. Big (well over six feet) and bearish, he did have luxuriant gray hair and a biblical beard—hairdresser plumage. Initially guarded and a bit surly, he was sheepish when he told me he wanted to write a book. “I’ve never really read a book,” he said. “But have I got stories.”

Peters has a very soft, boyish voice, and he went for instant intimacy, calling me “Billy,” a nickname I hadn’t heard since junior high, and telling me, “I like you. I like that Ivy League thing. You remind me of Herbert Allen,” the investment banker who had once controlled Columbia Pictures. When it came time to order, he announced, “I’m on a diet,” and asked for a turkey burger with cheese and a side of French fries. “I don’t drink,” he declared proudly, but soon ordered a Baileys Irish Cream.

“How do you do a book?” he asked me, referring to the business aspects of publishing. I explained that I’d have to write a proposal. Then the two of us would go to New York and sell it.

“For how much?” he pressed me.

“Depends on what you have to say,” I challenged him.

“What about this?” he said, kicking into high-gear pitch form. “What if I have not one but two, two of my women calling me from the Lincoln Bedroom, saying, ‘I just fucked the president.’ How’s that?”

“Who?” I couldn’t refrain from asking him.

“Let them guess. They’ll want it more.” (He never did tell me.) He paused for a minute, letting his display of negotiating savvy register, and continued, “What about this?” Then, in his only-her-hairdresser-knows-for-sure gossip mode, he went into a tale about his ex-wife Lesley Ann Warren emotionally confessing to him how the all-powerful, and nearly sainted, Funny Girl producer, Ray Stark, had come on to her. Years later, he claimed, the funny girl herself, Barbra Streisand, had made a similar tearful confession to him. “Can you imagine? Both of them.” (Both women have adamantly denied these claims.)

When Peters first went to New York as the consort of Streisand, she took him to a Broadway cocktail party and, lo and behold, who was there but Ray Stark. Peters told me that, unable to control himself, he seized the mini-mogul, hoisted him in the air, spun him around as if he were Howdy Doody, then threw him down onto a couch. He refrained from pummeling him and pretended he was just being playful, “but he knew that I knew,” Peters said. Streisand, he said, threw a fit at the lèse-majesté of a hairdresser disrespecting a studio god. But Peters noted that Stark instantly feared him, and that fear caused Stark to loosen his stranglehold on Streisand, enabling her to become her own person.

Sensing that I had sparked to his image as the showbiz vigilante, Peters went into a “You want violence, I’ve got violence” preview of fight bites: he claimed he had booted Charles Manson from a party, stood down O. J. Simpson over an insult, and headlocked Robert Blake to test his mettle for a part. Kicking ass became the trademark of Jon Peters. His ready recourse to his fists made him unique in a business of blusterers and bluffers.

eters and I kept meeting at the Polo Lounge. It was hard to get him alone, because he was always having people drop by, as if to vet me. He asked everyone if they thought he should do a book. Everyone, he told me, was gung-ho. There was his best friend in the studios, Mark Canton, who had been vice president of Warner Bros. There was his lawyer—one of many, it turned out—a tough West Virginian coal-town type who rode motorcycles with Peters and had been a counsel to the Church of Scientology, until they had a falling-out. Peters’s iron-man bodyguard-assistant came by, as did his two stunning adopted teenage blonde daughters, Caleigh and Skye, and his equally stunning young blonde girlfriend.

There wasn’t one knockout who strode through the Polo Lounge whom Peters didn’t notice or comment on. He boasted about how many women he had bought breast implants for. I pushed him to go through some of his romances. In addition to Lesley Ann Warren and Streisand, Peters clicked off liaisons with Pamela Anderson, Kim Basinger, Jacqueline Bisset, Linda Evans, Nicollette Sheridan, Sharon Stone, Leigh Taylor-Young, Vendela, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Peters aimed high with women and was known for his grand gestures, such as using the Sony corporate jet to deliver a whole storeful of flowers to Vendela, a story Peters denied with a big grin.

Dyed Roots

Jon Peters was born to fight, albeit not as far down the food chain as he would like to mythologize. His father, Jack, a Cherokee former Marine, ran a diner in Hollywood. His mother, Helen Pagano, a blonde babe of the Lana Turner sweater-girl school, came from an Italian family that owned a major salon on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, where she worked. But when Jack Peters died of a heart attack, Helen married a construction worker who got too tough with her, and Jon—who dared to stand up for his mother—soon found himself in juvenile hall. After getting out of reform school, he went back home but didn’t last long. When he was 13, his mother sent him to New York City, to be in the care of two men she knew from the hairdressing circuit. As Peters described it, his guardians turned out to be gay sexual predators. After hearing them arguing about who would be the first to “get” him on his maiden night in New York, he climbed out of the window, scampered down a drainpipe, and began living on the streets. He said he eventually found work by dropping the Pagano name at a West 57th Street salon that catered to a Broadway clientele of actresses, strippers, and hookers. He started out by sweeping up hair, and he slept in a cubicle above the salon. But he worked his way up to becoming a “muff dyer,” styling and coloring pubic hair. Peters said he was good at what he did.

In the early 60s, Peters, now back in Los Angeles, landed jobs for himself and his new wife at a teens-only nightclub called the Peppermint Stick. During the day Peters began doing hair. The first “famous hair” he did was that of Chubby Checker’s mother (Chubby had sung at the Stick), followed by the mane of Dee Dee Sharp, who had done her “Mashed Potato Time” on the Stick stage. Soon he was able to leverage these connections to a job at Bill White’s, on Ventura Boulevard, which was considered the ne plus ultra of Valley salons.

Peters made a name for himself at White’s, but the kind of name he really wanted was that of Gene Shacove, the proprietor of a hip Rodeo Drive salon, who bedded his rich and famous clients and cruised the Sunset Strip on a hot motorcycle or in a fuel-injected Sting Ray. Although Warren Beatty and screenwriter Robert Towne both credit Shacove as their inspiration for Shampoo, with a nod as well to Jay Sebring, the studly stylist murdered by the Manson family, Peters has said frequently that he was the original George Roundy. During one of our lunches at the Polo Lounge, Beatty came in with a friend and sat down at a prime table near the door. We were sitting toward the back—not in Siberia, yet not in Valhalla either—and Peters leapt out of his seat to greet him. But Peters lasted less than a minute in the ring with Beatty. I watched, and didn’t see them shake hands. Beatty didn’t even flash his famous grin. When Peters returned, he made no comment.

Peters’s ticket to Beverly Hills arrived in the person of a tall and stunning 19-year-old Jewish dancer-actress just transplanted from New York, Lesley Ann Warren. Peters was 21 in 1966 when he did a hairdressing house call for the wife of the musical director of the Disney movie The Happiest Millionaire, in which Warren was co-starring with Fred MacMurray, Greer Garson, and Tommy Steele. One year later, he was doing her hair. And soon after that he secured a divorce and married Warren in the same penthouse suite at the Sands in Las Vegas where Sinatra had married Mia Farrow the previous year. The newlyweds settled in a big house in Sherman Oaks, and, in 1968, had a son, Christopher.

By then Peters owned a salon on Ventura with an established Valley hairdresser, which he would eventually expand into a chainlet of four. Peters surprised me when he recounted that the woman who had the most influence in getting him to Beverly Hills was beauty client Sonja Henie, the Norwegian Olympic skater turned American movie star. Mostly unaware of Henie’s history, Peters was impressed when I told him that she had been Hitler’s pinup girl—a major crush that der Führer had pursued ardently at Berchtesgaden. To Peters, she was just “a rich old broad” whom he drove around on the back of his motorcycle. He made her feel so young, he said, that she gave him a hundred thousand dollars to finance his expansion. It was poetic revenge on the Pagano family—which had scorned and incarcerated him—that he was able to buy out its salon, located at 301 North Rodeo Drive, and rename it the Jon Peters Salon.

Color Me Barbra

Jon Peters’s biggest break occurred in the summer of 1973, when he was asked to style Barbra Streisand’s wigs for her upcoming film For Pete’s Sake. “She looked like Ray Stark’s grandmother,” Peters joked over lunch. Flattery was actually said to be Peters’s strong suit, but only after making women insecure first.

At Streisand’s estate on Carolwood Drive, Peters took long note of her “great ass, great tits, great body,” and told the diva what she had and what she was doing wrong with it. He wanted to make her into a hip rock chick—from Fanny Brice to, if not Cher, then at least Carly Simon. At the same time, he fell madly in love with Streisand, and, he told me, she quickly reciprocated.

Despite his amusing tales and Charles Dickens Goes to Hollywood biography, I wasn’t at all sure that New York publishers would fall over themselves for Jon Peters himself. He wasn’t exactly Jerry Bruckheimer, and, even so, only two books by Hollywood producers had ever made an impact—Julia Phillips’s 1991 career-suicide note, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, and Robert Evans’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, a few years later. I couldn’t tell how many sacred cows Peters was willing to sacrifice for a best-seller whose profits would seem like chicken feed compared with his points in Batman.

But Streisand was another matter. She was notoriously private, and publishing insiders were dubious that she would ever write her memoirs. And if she did, how much would she reveal? The inside story of the Peters-Streisand romance might send the book into Dan Brown territory, but would Jon Peters kiss and tell? Would he betray the secrets of the woman he described to me as the great love of his life, his current best friend, someone he spoke to all the time? “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is the hottest thing of all time. She’ll love it. Now, how much are we going to make?”

I tried to educate Peters about the realities of the publishing business: a blockbuster book was a speck compared with a blockbuster film. Still, he loved the idea of calling himself a “best-selling author,” and immediately felt he could single-handedly make things bigger than they were. “Do you realize how many people have seen my movies? Billions! If 10 percent of them bought this book &hellip; ” I tried to explain that one-tenth of 1 percent was a more accurate projection, but he was ready to start tying in the book to the next Superman trailer—“See the movie, read the book about the real Superman!”—notwithstanding the fact that the proposed sequel had neither a director nor a script.

Even if he became the next Vidal Sassoon, the young Jon Peters realized that he would still be a tenth-class citizen in Hollywood. His entrée into show business was a languishing script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, a remake of A Star Is Born, set in rock ‘n’ drug Los Angeles. Naturally, he told me, Streisand and her circle hated it.

But Peters persisted and sold Streisand on the project, even though, he admits, he never read the script. (“I had actors act it out,” he told me.) While Didion and Dunne may have been put through development hell by an illiterate hairdresser from a reformatory, it was the most lucrative hell they ever knew. Even though Peters eventually fired them and hired a handful of other A-list re-writers, the couple got credit and, because Star was a huge hit (albeit a critical disaster), they later admitted they had made more money on it than on any other film in their career. Its commercial triumph in 1976, capped by its five Golden Globe awards plus its Oscar for the song “Evergreen,” made Peters an overnight player. He sold his interest in his salon and devoted himself completely to his new life.

The Odd Couple

Our Polo Lounge lunches continued with regularity through March. Peters’s mansion in Beverly Park—the gated compound atop Mulholland Drive where his neighbors included Sylvester Stallone, Denzel Washington, and Sumner Redstone—was on the market for $20 million, and he was living on his Santa Barbara County horse ranch. He would drive himself down to meet me in his big black Escalade. He liked to drive, he said, didn’t use a chauffeur, and got a lot done on his cell phone.

One day, Peters’s former partner and co-chairman of Sony Columbia, Peter Guber, arrived at the Polo Lounge with ex–Warner C.E.O.—and later the head of Yahoo—Terry Semel. The duo seemed surprised to see Peters, who waved them over to our table. When he introduced me as the guy “who’s writing my book,” Guber in particular looked as if he’d seen a ghost, not a ghostwriter. “I blew his mind,” Peters exulted after they departed to their own table. “Did you see his hair? He looks like an old Jew in Miami Beach.” Guber’s hair did have a faintly orangish hue, and if anyone had a bad-hair detector, it was Jon Peters.

I soon found out what Guber had reason to be apprehensive about. Hell hath no fury like a co–studio head scorned. Guber and Peters were truly the odd couple of Hollywood. At the time they met, in the early 80s, Guber had everything Peters dreamed of: degrees from both college and law school (Syracuse, then N.Y.U.), a wife who was the heiress to the Isaac Gellis delicatessen fortune (and hence Jewish royalty), and a golden-boy career as a studio executive and producer (1977’s The Deep). What in the world, everyone in Hollywood wondered, did Peters offer Guber?

“Pussy,” Peters joked when I asked him. “Action. Great instincts. I know the market better than anyone. Hey, we loved each other. We were brothers.”

He also offered a very powerful mentor. Both Guber and Peters had come under the respective spells of two wild and crazy, coke-mad record moguls. Peters’s man was Columbia Records impresario Walter Yetnikoff, whom he had met through his brainstorms to team Streisand with Barry Gibb (“Woman in Love”) and Donna Summer (“Enough Is Enough”) on platinum smashes. Guber’s connection was disco king Neal Bogart, of Casablanca Records, who put Guber in charge of his film division to great results with Midnight Express and T.G.I.F. When Bogart died very young, the proper and seemingly uptight Guber may have had a wild-man void in his life, and Jon Peters—as Yetnikoff’s protégé—was the perfect fit.

When Streisand refused to marry Peters, he said, they became best friends. Peters sought solace in success, for which Guber would be his shaman. The two may have had nothing in common except their hits, but, in 1983, after the success of Flashdance, they landed a sweet production deal on the Warner lot, where they had an improbable run culminating in the late 80s with a best-picture Oscar for Rain Man and an all-time blockbuster in Batman. Their success gave Yetnikoff the ammunition to sell the dynamic duo to Sony, which after its $3.4 billion takeover of Columbia Pictures, in 1988, was looking for someone to run the studio. Peters’s warp-speed ride from hairdresser to producer to studio head made a business built on Schadenfreude apoplectic with jealousy. At the time, it seemed like a fittingly bizarre conclusion to one of the most outrageous business deals in entertainment history.

Alas, the Guber-Peters triumph did not last long. Starting with The Bonfire of the Vanities, in 1990, the flops kept on coming. Tensions mounted, and Guber and Peters even tried couples counseling. It didn’t help. All of this eventually culminated in what Peters described as Guber’s Judas-like betrayal of him to the Sony bosses, who needed a scapegoat for the studio’s poor performance. Peters was gone in 1991. Guber would be shown the door three years later. Their partnership allegedly cost Sony more than $3 billion in losses.

After eight meetings, the Polo Lounge’s famous guacamole began to cloy. It was time to test the book market. I set out to write a proposal, but only after securing a signed agreement from Peters that we would co-own copyright on the book and that my name would appear with his on the cover, linked by an “and.” The point was to ensure that I was his collaborator and, under no circumstances, his employee. Not that being a Jon Peters employee would have put me in bad company. DreamWorks C.E.O. Stacey Snider, producers Mark Canton and Laura Ziskin, and seemingly half of the top studio executives and producers in the business had toiled for him at some point in their careers. But a number of them, who had heard about my meetings with Peters, warned me they had been traumatized by the experience—that Peters could be the most mercurial, unpredictable, and demanding taskmaster since Simon Legree. “Keep your independence, keep your dignity, keep your sanity,” the producer who introduced me to Peters cautioned. “Get your money from the publisher, not him.”

And so I tried, creating a proposal that pitched Jon Peters as a fusion of Sammy Glick and Oliver Twist, with all the deep dish of Julia Phillips and Robert Evans thrown in. Who else in Hollywood, I psyched myself up, had as many hits and as many famous women and had come from such hopeless circumstances? Postponing the headache of writing in the voice of someone who did not, and could not, read, I composed the proposal in the third person and pitched Peters as I saw him. I came up with over-the-top lines such as “Peters became a legend for seduction as much as production.” I admit that I was writing to sell, but I also felt that a hyperbolic style fit the Barnumism of my subject. Writing the book itself could be a nightmare, but only if I sold it. Peters had once told me that, even though he couldn’t read and write, he had still “written” all of his films—that he had told his writers what to write, and was magnanimous in giving them the credit for his genius.

I sent the proposal to the New York agent David Vigliano, who specialized in books by celebrities and had done a great job in selling my last collaboration, Don’t Mind if I Do, the memoir of George Hamilton (which appeared, in excerpt form, in this magazine). Vigliano said he loved the proposal and felt it could be a big sale. The next step was to secure Jon Peters’s blessing. This commenced a new problem. Not only did Peters not read, he didn’t use e-mail, no longer had a development person or an assistant, and, despite what he said about his long car rides, almost never answered his cell phone.

Just as most people hate pictures of themselves, most subjects of biography hate seeing themselves in print. I had no idea what Peters thought until he invited me to stop by a birthday party he was giving for his girlfriend at Wolfgang Puck’s Cut steak house. The dinner looked like a Girls Gone Wild video, with a bevy of miniskirted beauties surrounding Canton and Peters, the only men at the party. Every one of them had read the proposal, and Peters asked them all to give me their input. Luckily, they all loved it, though one of the ladies admitted that the long list of love affairs “got a little much toward the end.” I suddenly realized how Peters probably got the script notes that drove writers crazy. This was his focus group.

Pitching Woo

We finally made it to New York and checked in at the Carlyle. Dressed in his standard sweat suit and black sneakers, Peters decided that he wanted a Ralph Lauren cashmere topcoat in preparation for our meetings. But it was late March, and Lauren was showing only spring. So I took him down Madison Avenue to Loro Piana, where he bought not only a cashmere topcoat, for $5,000, but also a pair of cashmere-lined sweatpants, for $2,000. I’m not sure whether it was a function of indifference or pride, but he never took the label off the coat sleeve. “I kind of dig New York,” he said. “I think I should spend more time here.”

Most of the major houses wanted to meet with us, except for Simon & Schuster. (Perhaps S&S was out because its chairman, Sumner Redstone, was the subject of an unflattering anecdote in the proposal regarding an antique couch and his long romance with one of Peters’s ex-wives, now a film producer herself.) We had two or three hour-long pitch meetings each day and were chauffeured between them in Vigliano’s Mercedes, stuffed with a veritable candy store of junk food.

Our first meeting was at Grand Central, the successor to Warner Books, which had recently been taken over and renamed by France’s Hachette. (This was too bad for Peters, who was planning to make his next Batman at Warner Bros. and would have liked the synergy.) We were taken to a huge conference room, where we met a top editor, the no-nonsense marketing wizard Beth de Guzman. She had with her only two colleagues, and Peters, expecting to draw a crowd, seemed to flag at the emptiness of the room. As at Hollywood pitch meetings, we got the plastic water bottles, but not the H&H bagels or William Poll tea sandwiches that out-of-town writers had come to expect. Maybe it was the recession.

Peters came to life at the next meeting, at Random House’s Broadway Books division. We still didn’t get any bagels, but we got double the crowd. What seemed to energize Peters here was the Broadway editor in chief, Stacy Creamer, a preppy Philadelphia Story–Kate Hepburn type. Peters went right to work on her short hair, saying it needed work. This was the Peters of legend, zeroing in on an obviously attractive woman and making her feel insecure, but in a warm, Beatty-esque way. He clearly understood that the way to a woman’s heart was through her tresses, because Creamer seemed to spark to his every word. The meeting went well beyond the normal hour.

Things got even livelier the next day when the limo took us down to the Flatiron Building, which houses St. Martin’s Press, now owned by the German book conglomerate Holtzbrinck, just as Random House is now owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann. There we got the royal treatment, albeit no bagels. Nearly a dozen editors, publishers, marketers, and foreign-rights people assembled in president Sally Richardson’s office, with its view of the Empire State Building. (Full disclosure: I am currently under contract with St. Martin’s for a forthcoming book.) Peters was perked up by editor Elizabeth Beier, a fashionable Yalie. “All you need is the right hairdo,” Peters noted, subtly going to work. I worried that she might be insulted, but Peters’s savvy critique was a reverse flattery that always seemed to work wonders.

The story in the proposal that St. Martin’s, as well as all the other publishers, seemed most interested in involved Barbara Walters’s 1976 network interview with Peters as A Star Is Born was coming out. Walters had asked him, for the world to see, if he was a hustler. Before the interview, Peters claimed, Walters had invited him up to her apartment and changed clothes with her bedroom door ajar. Was it an accident? Was it entrapment? “She had a great rack,” Peters told the St. Martin’s people. (When asked for comment, Walters responded, “absolutely absurd.”)

Peters could be funny and self-effacing, but he seemed to forget we were not on a studio lot and kept referring to our book as “the movie” as he acted out the fight scenes of his life. He also turned the tables on St. Martin’s and went from supplicant to mogul, seller to buyer. “I produced Color Purple. I produced Witches of Eastwick. I buy big books. I have a huge fund,” he told them, his Loro Piana label flapping at the sleeve. “I can pay top dollar. Don’t waste your time at the studios. Bring your books to me.” We left with a round of kisses from the editors, both male and female.

Instead of a fancy lunch at a Midtown restaurant, we picked up greasy pizza slices from a Ray’s imitator on 14th Street. Then we proceeded down to SoHo to Gotham Books, a division of England’s Penguin. (Of all the major houses, only Simon & Schuster is American-owned, by Redstone’s Viacom.) In austere offices we met Gotham president William Shinker, a very dapper old-school publisher who has held major posts at many of the houses. Although Shinker did assemble about five of his associates, Peters seemed subdued, possibly because there wasn’t much opportunity to do wonders with Shinker’s sixtysomething hair.

The next day, we took the Mercedes to Midtown, where a full house awaited at Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins. The point man there was editor Mauro DiPreta, to whom I was partial for his having done such a fine job, a few years before, with my Sinatra book, Mister S. Former publisher Judith Regan’s old deputy Cal Morgan was at the meeting, as was the Harper publisher, Michael Morrison, who controlled the purse strings and whom Peters seemed to bond with over their Italian roots, Anglo names notwithstanding.

The next stop was back at Random House, for the Ballantine division. Normally we would pitch only to one house per conglomerate, but Vigliano somehow thought it would be productive to let Random’s imprints fight this one out. The editor, Luke Dempsey, also rounded up a dozen associates, to Peters’s obvious pleasure. The meeting was high-energy and ebullient, thanks mostly to the transplanted Brit, Dempsey. On our way out, a very stylish woman got into a Random House elevator, and Peters pounced on her and told her how awful her hair was and how he could save it. I noticed Vigliano turning green. The woman, it turned out, was Susan Kamil, the all-powerful editor in chief of the company. The next day, she was sent a massive bouquet of flowers, in Peters’s name.

Our final meeting, the next morning, was again at Random, with Shaye Areheart, who had her own imprint there. Formerly Jackie Onassis’s right hand at Doubleday, and entirely unpretentious, Areheart made the huge error, as far as Jon Peters was concerned, of meeting with us all by herself in her small, Spartan office. I could see Peters sulk and pout. He barely said a word. Areheart went into a spiel about how advances weren’t everything, and how a house’s commitment and expertise could be more important than the cold cash it forked out. She cited the small fortune that Simon & Schuster had recently lost on another Hollywood memoir. “Uh, that was mine,” I interjected as she turned beet red. Peters did not offer to do her hair.

Soon the bids began coming in. Aside from Grand Central, where the wattage had been low, everyone we pitched wanted the book, even Shaye Areheart. We finally went with HarperCollins: I because I liked the idea of working again with DiPreta, Peters because it was the publisher that had sent the most people to meet with him. The HarperCollins bid was in the high six figures, remarkable for the recession. Plus, it was for only North American rights. Japan alone, where he was known as “tiger-san” for his wild and zooish behavior with the shoguns at Sony, would be enormous. The Streisand scoop might have global reach. This was surely a seven-figure book, if not eight.

Then the hatred erupted. The New York Post’s Cindy Adams began her April 24 column with a biting account of the deal. Using as sources the publishers whose bids fell short, the story issued the unkindest cut of all by calling Peters “chubby” and “scruffy,” noting that he never removed his coat and suggesting that he “could use a hairdresser.” “Do I look fat?” he asked me shortly after the item ran. “I’m going to work out for hours every day.”

Nasty pieces appeared all over the press, including in The New York Times, and on tabloid television shows and CNN. None was nastier than that of Nikki Finke, who posted nearly the entire proposal on her must-read industry blog, DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com: “In all my time covering Hollywood, I have never read a more vile betrayal of everyone and everything in Hollywood by a showbiz figure. And that’s saying a lot.” Finke quoted Guber as saying, “I find it surprising that any publisher would be interested in this work of fiction.”

Then the female name that would have sold the most books entered the mounting media circus. In response to another Post item—barbra streisand ex ready to tell all—in late May, Streisand issued a statement on her Web site: “Just for the record, the claims and statements attributed to me in Jon Peters’ book proposal are either completely distorted or simply untrue.”

As the uproar increased, I began getting all-hours phone calls from Peters, 10 to 20 a day. He was certain Streisand would be delighted with the final product, but having seen the attention that just the proposal had attracted, he now wondered if he had sold his memoir short. Peters claimed he was already planning his appearance on Oprah, since, after all, he had “discovered” her for The Color Purple, and she happened to be his Santa Barbara neighbor. He recounted to me that even Arnold Schwarzenegger had given his blessing when they ran into each other at a memorial service. He said he received supportive calls from David Geffen and Calvin Klein urging him to press forward. Maybe we should have gotten $10 million for it, he told me. What did Hillary get?, he wondered. (Schwarzenegger did not respond to a request for comment, and Geffen didn’t characterize his call as supportive. Klein denies calling altogether.)

In mid-May, Peters asked me to read the Studio Head proposal to him over the phone. At 30-odd pages, it took about four hours. At the end, he said, “Jesus! I had no idea. This is amazing. You made me amazing.” It dawned on me that until that point he had probably never read, or had read to him, the book proposal we had sold.

Peters then began exploring what it would take to publish the book himself and make all the profits, not a mere 12 to 15 percent royalty. He quickly saw that it was the publisher, not the author, who stood to get rich if the book was a smash. Because we had not yet signed the HarperCollins contract, the deal was not officially done. Peters asked me to draft a letter for him, in which I used his genuine pique at the publisher’s inability to stem the leaks of the proposal and the erupting firestorm to say thanks but no thanks to its generous offer. The letter went out on the letterhead of his business manager and soon became the talk of the tabloids and the Web.

Publish or Perish

As Samuel Johnson said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” I did find the Peters saga amusing, but this man couldn’t live by dish alone. Before I walked away from HarperCollins, I got Peters to agree, as my putative new publisher, to pay me the same advance and royalties HarperCollins was going to pay. Numerous insiders wondered if Peters might be over-extended in the current financial milieu, when his real estate and stocks were likely not worth what they used to be. (This feeling was reinforced months later when the L.A. Times reported he’d nearly halved the asking price on his Beverly Park home—from $20 to $12 million.) I tried to be diplomatic about it. Could he really afford this publishing venture?

“You want me to show you the check I just got from Caddyshack?” he fumed. He went through all his hit films, the global grosses, the gargantuan residuals. In their definitive book about the Guber-Peters reign at Sony, Hit & Run, Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters estimated that Peters’s severance package ranged anywhere from $30 to $50 million, although no official figure was ever released. Rain Man and the first Batman—both of which he had points on—each grossed more than $400 million worldwide. Despite his predilection for expensive property, and his propensity for divorce and alimony, it would be hard for anybody to go through that kind of money.

Yet it became a case of the billionaire doth protest too much. He insisted I come up that weekend to Santa Barbara to see his ranch, a stunning and vast property, stretching from the towering Santa Ynez Mountains to the Pacific. Peters lived with his most recent ex-wife, Mindy, a tall midwestern blonde, in a motel-like suite of 1950s outbuildings which were temporary quarters pending the construction of his Xanadu. There were lots of Tiffany lamps and other antiques, as well as a collection of guns, to shoot snakes and intruders. “You still think I’m poor?” he pressed me after the grand tour in a supercharged golf cart.

I took Peters at his word and had my lawyer work up a new collaboration agreement with one of Peters’s several lawyers (they kept changing). Later that week, I met at the Polo Lounge with staff from Variety, with whom Peters was discussing taking out a $60,000 movie-style ad kicking off Studio Head, the book, as if he were announcing commencement of production on a huge-budget film. There were mock-ups of Hirschfeld-esque caricatures of Peters, looking sleek and cool in his trademark dark glasses, and an array of quotes from all the press we had gotten around the world, as if they were blurbs from film reviews. I had the idea to add, just for fun, a fake quote, “‘See you in court!’—Melvin Belli,” referring to the famous Hollywood lawyer who represented, among others, Lana Turner, Mae West, and Errol Flynn. Peters loved it and told the Variety people to put it in.

After weeks of wrangling, the lawyers finally drew up a collaboration agreement, which Peters and I signed in June. The producer who had introduced us had warned me that Peters, accustomed to having the studio pay his bills, had “checkbook paralysis.” Having worked for five months on spec, I hadn’t heeded his warning and worried I wouldn’t be paid at all. This book, however, was still too good not to do. Peters was now talking about a “research trip” we would take—renting a Ferrari in Zurich and driving through the Alps to Italy, with him reminiscing all the way. Perhaps this was his Hollywood vision of how a memoir was crafted. However, once Peters found out he could not get the first-class tickets he wanted with his frequent-flier miles, he canceled the trip. “He won’t spend his own money,” the producer reminded me.

I remained confident Peters would pay me, that ego would trump parsimony, especially after our first taping session at my apartment. Peters recalled his romance with Streisand, which was sexy, violent, funny, and ultimately touching. Two days later we met again to do a tape about his childhood. Again, no check, but more great material. At the end of the session, I received a phone call explaining that my elderly mother had gotten a serious blood clot in her leg. I had to speak with her doctor, but Peters was incensed that I would be ignoring him for a few minutes. “You work for me now! You can’t waste my time like this,” he said chillingly.

I went ahead and called my mother’s doctor. Outraged by my divided attention, Peters seized my two tape recorders (I didn’t want to risk losing anything) and stormed out. An hour later, his driver rang from my lobby and said Peters had left his phone and wallet at my place. I found them and gave them to him. I could have withheld them until he returned my tape recorders, but that would have been petty. Besides, I recalled what he allegedly had done to Ray Stark.

Lawyers tried to forge a rapprochement, but nothing worked. The effort was to set up some work rules, a modus operandi, some boundaries, but Peters knew no boundaries. It seemed to me that he wanted a companion as much as he wanted a book.

In any event, I never got paid and the deal never happened. The Variety announcement never ran. A few weeks after the split, Peters left a message on my voice mail saying, in a bewildered, apologetic tone, that he wasn’t sure what had happened and that I had always been supportive and “loving” to him. I thought about calling back, but I decided I needed to escape this authorial psychodrama. As much as I wanted to tell this story and create the ultimate Hollywood blockbuster, I didn’t want to become a Pavlovian dog chasing a rainbow of dish. I didn’t return the call. A month later I heard that Peters had told someone he had begun working with a “world-famous writer” whom he would not identify. I didn’t feel jealous. I had moved on. Studio Head may have been too good to be true for me, but I hoped someone somewhere could survive to tell the tale.

Then, one day in late November, I picked up my phone and heard the voice of Jon Peters. “Can we be friends?” he asked. I wasn’t a grudge type, and Hollywood, for all its venom, isn’t a grudge town. Peters was all charm, even asking about my mother. He said that he was moving back to Los Angeles from the ranch, that he was working full-time on another remake of A Star Is Born. It sounded huge, as did his planned upcoming television series based on Eyes of Laura Mars. Jon Peters seemed to be defying Fitzgerald’s dictum about second acts. I didn’t ask about the book, but I had the feeling the last chapters were yet to be written.